The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz

A Conversation With Diana Butler Bass

In this episode, award‑winning author and religious historian Diana Butler Bass recounts her journey from an evangelical college student to a professor who was fired in the early 1990s, a turning point that led her to mainstream mainline churches and a prolific writing career. She explains how the political‑religious shift of the Reagan era and the rise of the Religious Right reshaped evangelical institutions, and she situates today’s Christian nationalist surge within a broader pattern of American religious cycles of expansion and contraction. Bass also reflects on gender dynamics in both evangelical and progressive faith spaces, noting persistent misogyny but also greater accountability in liberal denominations. Throughout, she offers a historian’s lens on why America is now experiencing a possible “fourth Great Awakening” driven by cultural backlash and political mobilization.